‘The Monk of Mokha,’ by Dave Eggers

2of3Mokhtar Alkanshali, is the subject of David Egger's new book, "The Monk of Mokhtar", as seen on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2018 in Oakland, Calif.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

3of3Dave Eggers at Port of Mokha, founded by Mokhtar Alkhanshali.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

In the spring of 2015, news outlets ran a story about a 26-year-old, raised in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, who had fled Yemen on a skiff, crossing the Red Sea with little more than two suitcases filled with rare coffee beans. The young man, Mokhtar Alkhanshali, had roamed the remote hillsides of his ancestral homeland, on a quixotic mission to bring Yemeni coffee — then considered mediocre — to the world. “These samples have survived rockets and mortars and pirates,” he told a Bay Area television station. “It really feels like I was in some sort of action adventure novel.”

This was the sort of brief news story that raised far more questions than it answered; one person who wanted to know more was Dave Eggers. Not long after, he and Alkhanshali met up at Blue Bottle Coffee in Oakland’s Jack London Square. Alkhanshali stepped inside and brought out a cup of Ethiopian coffee. Wait for it to cool or the heat will hide the flavor, he instructed Eggers. Thus began the author’s apprenticeship into the intricacies of coffee, Yemen and much more, guided by Alkhanshali, a thoroughly winning entrepreneur whose story, by turns hilarious and harrowing, is chronicled in “The Monk of Mokha.”

Alkhanshali is a bundle of energy — vibrate is the word Eggers uses throughout the book. Where he should place that energy is his central struggle. As a kid, home was a small apartment on Polk Street, nestled between two porn shops, where he shared a room with five younger siblings. Alkhanshali grows up quickly but never turns hard, is bright but doesn’t take to school. He sells cars, loads produce onto trucks, and works as a doorman at the Infinity, a pair of luxury high-rises in the South of Market neighborhood, where he must hop from his chair to open the door for professional athletes and tech executives. The job is pointless: He could press a nearby button to open the doors. But his office title is “lobby ambassador,” and so he spends his days moving from the desk to the door, a diplomat where the stakes couldn’t possibly be lower.

His life changes with a friend’s text message. “Across the street there’s a statue of a Yemeni dude drinking a big cup of coffee.” Alkhanshali checks out the bronze, erected in a plaza near the Infinity. The statue is the logo of Hills Bros., the coffee company founded in San Francisco in the 1890s, and it fires his imagination. At home, his mom is incredulous. “Yemenis basically invented coffee. You didn’t know this?”

Alkhanshali’s vibrations intensify, and now they find a purpose. He wanders San Francisco with rolled-up sheets of paper that outline his plan to return Yemeni coffee to greatness. He dreams of supporting the descendants of the small farmers who roasted the world’s first coffee beans, who have since been displaced by their counterparts in Guatemala, Java and Brazil. Early on, he pitches his idea to an acquaintance who had struck it semi-rich in the tech industry.

“Do you have a business plan?” he asks. Alkhanshali pulls out a stack of papers, what Eggers describes as “a bizarre combination of manifesto, history lesson, idea dump and rant,” along with another page of bullet points.

“Mokhtar, I have to be honest with you,” the acquaintance says. “This is the ghettoest business plan I’ve ever seen.”

There are other complications. Alkhanshali isn’t much of a coffee drinker and doesn’t know the first thing about growing coffee. Even if he did, he doesn’t have any money. Then there are the special challenges of Yemen, whose coffee quality is notoriously unpredictable and whose territory is the base for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But Alkhanshali pushes forward, learning what he can by hanging around Blue Bottle, where he slurps coffee, takes notes, and talks to anyone who will listen.

He rides his enthusiasm all the way to Yemen, where he visits the country’s 32 coffee-producing regions and carries himself as an expert. At the first farm, he gently caresses the leaves of a coffee bush, lost in thought. Someone points out that he is rubbing an olive tree.

“‘I know that,’ Mokhtar said, attempting to recover. ‘But the vegetation around the coffee plants affects their health.’ He had made this up on the spot, and only later discovered that it was true.”

Despite his initial ignorance, Alkhanshali has soon gathered a wealth of information about the country’s coffee trade and made the most critical discovery: Yemeni farmers, despite having been overlooked by the specialty coffee market, still produced some of the world’s best beans. Alkhanshali is a fast learner, and in 2015 he founds Port of Mokha, a coffee roaster based in Oakland that imports its beans from Yemeni farms.

There’s a lot about coffee in this book, most of it exquisitely interesting, from the challenges of becoming a Q grader — a sort of sommelier for coffee — to the kopi luwak, a coffee made by beans that have been eaten and excreted by a catlike creature in Sumatra. Eggers previously considered himself “a casual coffee drinker and a great skeptic of specialty coffee,” and he tells the story of the bean with a novice’s excitement, bringing a perspective of wonder and attention to detail that vibrates — to use his word — on the page.

Eggers, of course, initially made his name in 2000 with his over-the-top-but-sincere memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” He has since submerged himself in the lives of others — “Zeitoun” (2009), “What Is the What” (2006) — and pared back the pathos. His love for his subjects is obvious, expressed through his investment of time in understanding their lives. (For “The Monk of Mokha,” Eggers interviewed Alkhanshali for hundreds of hours, traveled to Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti, and even took a Q grading coffee course.) The result is a book about poverty and war, about being Muslim in America, about Donald Trump and Barack Obama and drone attacks that kill civilians. Alkhanshali’s story will no doubt be hailed as quintessentially American — the dream made real — as a counter to the current wave of Islamophobia and immigrant bashing. But that’s really chauvinism of a different sort. This is about the human capacity to dream — here, there, everywhere.

Gabriel Thompson is the author of “America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century” and “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com